What’s killing Trump’s voters?

What’s killing Donald Trump’s voters?

That’s my reaction to the highly disturbing health news that two Princeton economists have uncovered about a key slice of the billionaire presidential candidate’s support base.

Since 1999, middle-aged white Americans with a high school diploma or less education have been dying in record numbers, according to Angus Deaton (a winner this year of a Nobel Prize) and his wife, Anne Case.

For example, the mortality rate for non-college-educated whites 45 to 54 years old increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014. By comparison, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to fall steadily during the same period, as did the death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.

Death rates for middle-aged, non-college whites in other wealthy countries also declined.

And the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 270 per 100,000.

That’s a stunning reversal of earlier trends. Middle-aged blacks, to cite one example, still have a higher mortality rate — 582 per 100,000, compared with 415 for all middle-aged whites — but the gap is closing. In other words, blacks and Hispanics of all age brackets have been showing improvements in these pathological indicators. Middle-aged whites have not. Why?

Most of this rising mortality, says the Deaton-Case study, is driven by an epidemic of self-destruction: Suicides and substance abuse, particularly alcohol-related liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

What’s tougher to pin down is why. Deaton and Case have no clear answer, and that leaves plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to speculate.

What strikes me is how today’s middle-aged, lower-income white Americans, wedged between the baby boomers and the millennials, make up the leading edge of a generation that came of age after the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s — a big peace dividend of robust New Deal spending and high-paying, low-skill factory jobs.

When globalism and other structural economic changes in the 1970s and beyond left the less-educated behind, it is not unfair to say that white Americans were far more disappointed and resentful than, say, blacks and Hispanics, for whom broken promises were nothing new.

It is to the left-behind crowd, whose demographic profiles closely resemble those of Donald Trump’s base, that Trump speaks most directly and effectively.

“In terms of demographics, Trump’s supporters are a bit older, less educated and earn less than the average Republican,” Real Clear Politics reported in September, citing YouGov polls.

The report by Stanford political science professors David Brady (who also is a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution) and Douglas Rivers, chief scientist at YouGov, found that slightly more than half of Trump’s supporters were women. About half of his supporters were between 45 and 64 years of age, another 34 percent were more than 65 years old and less than 2 percent were younger than 30.

One-half of Trump’s voters had a high school education or less, and about 19 percent had a college or post-graduate degree, the authors said. More than a third of his supporters earned less than $50,000 per year, while only 11 percent earned more than $100,000 per year. “Definitely not country club Republicans,” the professors concluded, “but not terribly unusual either.”

What unites Trump’s supporters is a profound sense of discontent, betrayal and abandonment by a country and economy that promised them a better life than what they’re struggling through.

Rod Dreher of The American Conservative calls them “the dispossessed,” a group characterized by a strong sense that something owed to them has been taken away by today’s elites — including immigrants, minorities and other “special interests” who elites have told them are the real enemies of their upward mobility.

Trump’s campaign, as well as those of Ben Carson and other insurgents in this Year of the Political Outsider, benefits hugely from such attitudes of discontent.

But what I don’t hear from Trump supporters with whom I have talked is a strong degree of trust in Trump to keep his promises, either. After all, they’ve been burned before. To many of them, Trump’s promises seem to be less important than his presence. He “tells the truth,” they tell me, by which they mean that he seems to feel their pain.

Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.